Luxation
by Val Royeaux
Summary: The hardest part was stepping into his old shoes and realizing they no longer fit. Series of Asch-centric one-shots post game, cross posted onto AO3


Sheer exhaustion is the only thing that keeps him from fully registering the sad, and almost angry disappointed faces around him. Exhaustion and the feeling of arms so tightly wrapped around his body that he begins to feel faint.

Natalia smells like magnolia oil and perspiration, and he appreciates the smell of her sweat more than he does the flowers. In his dreams he'd smell nothing but the flowers. The smell of salt and sweat cements in his mind the fact that she is here, they are here, this is real.

He is alive.

The Albiore is warm, nearly to the point of being suffocating.

Pipes and metal squeak and screech below his feet, above his head all around him. Natalia snores quietly beside him, asleep but somehow still seemingly pained. Every sound is amplified by the quiet, every small bit of turbulence seems earth shaking because he's been sitting still for so long.

His hands scratch at his smock, damp, heavy, and unbearably warm from Natalia's tears. His fingers are vicious and angry, scratching and digging through the fabric till he manages to tear through the flimsy material and reach skin.

His nails stop just short of breaking skin when Natalia stirs in her sleep, mumbles something coherent enough for him to register as actual words, but too muddled for him to actually decipher.

Asch looks down at his torn clothes, the claw marks across his chest, and then back at Natalia who has not found any peace in her sleep. He decides he needs to take a walk.

Voices filter through the hallway, quiet and upset. He does not want to know who they belong to, he does not want to know what they're saying, and he knows they do not want him to find them but his feet move on their own, they move with conviction. They move because he knows they have to.

Tear and Guy sit in a dimly lit room, heads as close together as Guy's condition will allow them. When he steps inside they stop speaking, Guy squints at him as if he's attempting to tell who exactly is standing in the doorway. Tear looks as if she's seen a ghost.

He thinks of many things to say, some he wants to, some he doesn't. In retrospect none of it seems as fitting as what spontaneously leaves his mouth.

"I'm sorry." Asch holds his breath, waiting on some kind of reaction, waiting for the absolute worst. Guy says nothing, which is a relief. But Tear just nods, and even in the poor light he can see the quiet tears marking trails across her skin and it makes his stomach drop.

He thought the hard part would be facing what Luke had cultivated; the relationships he built, that had never even been an option for Asch. No, the hardest part was stepping into his old shoes and realizing they no longer fit him.

He refuses to live in the Fabre manor, let alone the room Luke had occupied for seven years. His mother is hurt, but understanding, and his father—well he's never been able to read him much and now isn't any different.

So they prepare a room for him in the castle, but it isn't much better. Corridors he'd practically owned as a child, secret corners he'd been the first to discover, they were all foreign to him now. A complicated maze of hallways and stairs that made him feel helpless and angry.

He sticks to what he knows—his room, the library, and when he feels like he can't breathe he follows the trail of tacky portraits to the foyer and eventually the courtyard. He hides behind books and up in trees on the edge of the castle gardens, never far enough from what was familiar to him as a child but just enough to hide from the footman Natalia had assigned to look after him.

He should know better than to expect Natalia to rely on someone else to do a job for her though.

"You're late." How many times as he seen that look of cold annoyance, impatiently staring up at him from the bottom of a tree.

Too many even after being gone for nearly a decade.

At a certain point in his life he'd missed it, but now he couldn't remember why he ever did.

"Sleeping." Is all he says, one eye open as he stares down at her from his seat on the branch of a rather sturdy oak.

"Aunt Suzanne was expecting you half an hour ago." His mother had been kind enough to give him his space, she expected little of him, and somehow he still couldn't quite bring himself to give her even that much. He felt guilty, but the guilt he felt because of his mother did not outweigh the discomfort he'd feel sitting at the same place at the Fabre dining table where Luke had sat for an entire decade.

For so long he'd yelled and screamed to no one about what he'd give to pry his life back from the hands of 'that piece of trash'. But it was no longer his to take.

When Natalia receives no reply she heaves a needlessly melodramatic sigh, slips off her heels, and rolls up her sleeves. Asch sits up straight, eyebrows furrowed in angry confusion.

"What are you doing?"

Natalia places one foot on the trunk of the tree and begins pulling herself up the tree.

"What does it look like? I'm bringing you down." There is something irrationally frightening about Natalia pursuing him up a tree, maybe it's the look of determination and purpose in her eyes—like she's set on drawing blood, maybe it's the fact that no human being should be able to climb so quickly in a dress. Whatever the case his gut reaction is to climb further up the tree, but it's only when he reaches for a branch that he realizes he is at the very top of it.

Nowhere left to hide.

"Fine, fine! I'll come down, alright? Just, stop climbing ok!" She smirks in that annoying Natalia way that tells you she knew she was going to win from the very beginning, but nonetheless he stays true to his word and descends down the tree.

When he reaches the ground he dusts himself off, adjusts his sleeves, and waits for Natalia to join him on the ground. But she does not move.

"Any day now Natalia."

"I…I can't get down." Asch stares up at her, dangling from a branch, absolutely dumbfounded.

"What do you mean you can't get down?!"

"As in I cannot descend, am unable to reach the ground, find myself incapable of—"

"Okay okay! I get it, just give me a second." They'd been through this situation before; this wasn't the first time Natalia had chased him up a tree after all. He'd been hoping that over the years he'd gained enough ingenuity to avoid the methods he'd used when he was seven. But alas, there seemed to be no other way. "Okay, on the count of three you're going to let go of the branch-"

Natalia groans, kicking her feet in the air to drive her disapproval home.

"Your aim is awful, you always miss!" Asch scowls.

"I'm going to leave you here." This earns him an outrage gasp and Natalia kicks her legs with more fury.

"You wouldn't _dare_." She's right, he wouldn't, but that didn't mean he couldn't enjoy the fruits of a bluff or two. It's another ten minutes of arguing and coming up with faulty plans before Natalia concedes.

She lets go of the branch, and unlike all those other times, he catches her.

But also unlike all those other times, Natalia weighs twice as much as she did then. Caught up in his moment of triumph, he forgets to account for this and the weight of having her launched at him causes him to stumble and the both of them to fall deep into a neatly trimmed hedge.

They tumble out of the bushes, picking twigs out of their hair and bickering as they pull thorns from their fingers. Then suddenly, they're out of words to shout and the two of them are face to face, their cheeks smudged with dirt and their mouths pulled into angry frowns.

Natalia is the first to falter.

The corners of her mouth twitch, and sheer resolve is the only thing that keeps her from giving in. But Asch furrows his brows and concentrates, and then his face his entirely red and he knows Natalia doesn't stand a chance.

She doubles over and laughs, nearly hysterical. It's completely uncouth and seemingly unlike her if you don't know really _know _her. Her laugh sounds like bells, loud obnoxious bells that bong at the most inappropriate times. It is the first familiar thing in the castle that has not put him on edge.

For the first time he feels like his feet are on the ground.

"C'mon, we're already late." Natalia manages to stand up straight and the two of them make their way to the Duke's manor, disheveled, dirty and wracked with giggles (well Natalia, anyway).

Sleep is hard to come by most nights, but on the days Asch has to visit the Fabre manor it is practically unattainable. There is too much of Luke in that house. The staff is always confused when addressing him, they don't know who he is, all they know is who he's supposed to be and despite their best efforts to hide that fact it's still transparent. And his mother is always guilty, always afraid; when she speaks to him she is careful and rushed all at once. Careful because she doesn't want to drive him away, rushed because she fears that despite her best efforts he may disappear anyway.

He is restless, and before he realizes where he is going he is at Natalia's door.

Being around her is difficult, as is attempting to figure out what to say to her anymore. But those few moments of clarity when he does know what to say and do are the only things that seem to get him through the day.

It's the first time he's been in her room since they were children, it's changed remarkably but somehow that is not as jarring as all the things in the castle that are familiar to him. It's changed, but it's still Natalia's room, different but still the same. He wishes that it gave him hope for himself, that he would at some point grow comfortable in this skin that's been molded and reshaped to the point where he barely recognizes it but somehow still fits him seamlessly. But rooms are not lives, all they need is a fresh coat of paint and new furniture to reflect their new owner. No amount of plaster or paint could turn any of this back to what it used to be, or what he wanted it to be.

His eyes are drawn to a book on Natalia's shelf; he runs a finger down the spine before slipping it off her shelf.

"The Great Big Book of Ghost Stories- you were always into this stuff huh." He flips through the pages and Natalia quietly moves over to him and peers over his shoulder.

"Do you remember? Every year during the week Yulia Day fell on they'd have a fair, and the merchants would practically line up in the streets to sell their wares—I wanted the book but Nanny wouldn't buy it for me-" She speaks slowly, almost carefully, stealing glances at him every few words. Asch's eyes remain trained on the book, and when he finally begins to speak his words merge into hers and he seamlessly continues the story.

"So I saved up money, secretly helped Pierre in the garden so I could buy it for you the next year." For a moment Natalia is surprised, but her lips give away into a smile. Asch continues, unable to suppress a wry smile of his own. "Heh, my knees got so scraped up from all that weeding. Mother was suspicious and gave me the third degree for days, but I didn't want to get Pierre in trouble."

"You were always a terrible liar though." Natalia laughs, and Asch grumbles something annoyed and incoherent in response but he knows she's right.

Silence falls between them, and the two of them stand in the dark, both waiting for the other to make the next move. Talking about the past is easy but living in the present is hard, and he doesn't know if he'll ever figure out how to cope with the latter.

"Can you read to me?" Natalia squints at him through the dark, lips parted in that way that he knows means she's got something on her mind but she isn't sure if she should say it.

She doesn't, and instead she takes the book from him and sits down on her bed. He follows her, sits down on the chair across from her. From the corner of her eye she glances at the spot beside her on the bed, and he can tell she's disappointed—some people wore their hearts on their sleeves, Natalia wore hers on her face.

But she forces a smile, and she opens the book and reads to him until she's too tired to string anymore words together.

The room is bathed in orange when he wakes up. The light streams in through the cracks between the curtains, the reflections of the shiny baubles and trinkets strewn across her room shimmer and bounce off the walls, and for the thousandth time in the past two weeks he thinks he's still sleeping.

Natalia shifts in her sleep and the book from last night falls from her hands and onto the floor with a dull thud, the dream sequence ends abruptly. He gets up and puts it on her night stand, and for a moment he lingers, watching the rising and falling of her chest.

He reaches over to pull her covers over her, but he stops just short of doing so—unable to muster the courage to create a place for himself in this moment.

He has one foot out the door when Natalia's voice comes floating across the room, still slightly muffled by sleep.

"I'm happy you're here, I hope one day you realize that you deserve to be too." That day on Eldrant, as he sat on top of the carcasses of tens of dozens of oracle knights, he thought for hours of the things he would say to her if he'd been given the chance. But now, here, she is less than ten feet away from him and his mind his blank and his throat is so dry he thinks he may choke.

He closes the door behind him, and coherent thought comes back to him once more. He navigates the maze of hallways back to his room, and once his head reemerges from the depths of his wash basin he finally gains the strength to speak.

"I hope so too."


End file.
